DOCman Secrets: Brief permissions

DOCman 1.5 has a unique permission system allowing you to divide up your documents and categories in such a way that you can deliver them securely and efficiently. One question I’m often asked in my daily role as Support Engineer on the forums is how to get these permissions right.

I took the time and put together a video that outlines a common permission scheme.

Imagine you need to build a school website and they want to make documents available to their students and staff. Of course the students are not allowed to access documents of the staff. While all staff people are registered users, students are a mix between registered users and guests.

Step 2: Hide empty categories A small change to the theme will ensures that students don’t see the ‘Staff’ category.

Step 3 : Allow guest to download documents I added two documents to the ‘Students’ category. Doc A should be accessible by everybody visiting the website, therefor we must ensure that guests have access to download.

Step 4: Set permissions for Doc B Doc B differs only in that we set it’s view level to registered users so it is only accessible to registered users.

Step 5: Create the ‘Staff’ Group and add users We want to limit certain documents to staff only. Therefor we create a new DOCman Group called ‘Staff’ and add all our staff users.

Step 6: Create a document only for your Staff Documents for your staff will now simply get the permission level of ‘Staff’ (the DOCman group we created). Since students have no access to the ‘Staff’ group, they won’t have access to these documents.

As ever we welcome and appreciate your feedback and suggestions on future topics you would like to see discussed.

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